SGMA could help secure safe and reliable water for disadvantaged communities dependent on groundwater, while forcing farmers to reduce their crop production. But that’s only if SGMA goes as planned, and it might not.

Scientists explore the impact of climate change and what could happen if global warming exceeds 1.5 degrees. Discover how the latest innovations and technology are posing potential solutions and what individuals can do to prevent further damage.

“Our nation has come a long way, and we still have a long way to go.” said Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray, pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal (FAME) Church of Los Angeles during the 1992 Uprising.

The Watts Uprising and the 1992 L.A. Rebellion were both fiery chapters in L.A.’s history. Many are asking, “how could history have repeated itself?” To answer that question, we delve into the events that conspired to create more conservative reforms.

Many observers have been shocked by the extreme brutality with which police departments have responded to the mostly peaceful protests. Activist Tamika Mallory says the militarized police response is not a new development.

Local youths are given the opportunity to voice concerns with L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti and L.A. County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer about schools, their city and how to navigate life during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

"Tending Nature" shines a light on the environmental knowledge of indigenous peoples across California by exploring how the state's Native peoples have actively shaped and tended the land for millennia.

Not In My Backyard | KCET

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Not In My Backyard

Erin Aubry Kaplan is an author, journalist and essayist who has been writing about black Los Angeles and wider issues since 1992. She teaches creative nonfiction at Antioch University Los Angeles and current events at the OASIS center in the Crenshaw district.

Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a homeowner community like the appearance of renters, and absolutely no renters generate fear--and loathing--like the government-subsidized tenants known as Section 8.

I am reluctantly learning this. I admit up front that I am one of the homeowners made uneasy by the recent arrival of a Section 8 family a few houses down the block from me. I was somewhat surprised at my resistance that felt almost physical. I promptly argued with myself that it wasn't the fact this family was poor and black that I objected to, it was the shift in local fortune that their arrival portended: this part of Inglewood was trending down from south of middle class to working class, maybe a bit south of that. We were all watching the recession fray the edges of an already rare and delicate fabric--a modestly middle class black neighborhood, which Inglewood happens to be--and the new neighbors were proof of a new reality. Of course it was distressing, but it was nothing personal. The new people could have been anybody. That they were numerous, disinclined to be friendly and sporting several tattoos among them had nothing to do with anything.

I was right in one way. But I was also fooling myself, or at the very least half-fooling myself. And I felt like a hypocrite. It's one thing to advocate for poor black people in theory, which I do, quite another to have them living next door. So accustomed have we grown to their isolation, we don't expect them to live anywhere except amongst each other (Inglewood does have poor blacks in its mix, always has, but they don't live on my block--emphasis on "my"). And let's face it; while everybody reviles the poor in America, no one is reviled quite like poor black folk. The seemingly permanent fusion of race and poverty, and the isolation that always comes with it, is like a neutron bomb that explodes all the good things that we desperately want to believe about this country: that it is fair, decent, colorblind, democratic, etc.

And nobody is more frightened by this bomb than the working and middle class blacks who have worked so hard to put as much distance between themselves and black poverty as they possibly can. I'm talking about distance that isn't just geographic, but psychic. Black people may talk longingly about the good old days of segregation in L.A., when blacks of all classes lived together in the same communities and those communities were better for it. But today that kind of economic diversity is hardly a goal; indeed, it's something to avoid at all costs. The unspoken conventional wisdom is that black poor people don't strengthen a community, they undermine it. Just ask a normally stoic neighbor of mine down the street who, upon hearing about the Section 8 family, groaned loudly. "Oh good lord," she said, looking crushed. "That's it." It's like we'd all died, or were getting ready to.

I can report at this point that the new neighbors, for all the consternation they've generated around here, are nearly invisible. I hardly see or even hear them. It's like they know they're being watched and worried about, know exactly the kind of baggage they're perceived to be carrying, and so keep to themselves. The worst thing they've done is let their little dog loose in the street; I worry for his safety. Of course, that's a such a bourgeois thing, worrying about the welfare of a dog first--is he eating enough? Is he well, happy? At some point I'll have to ask those questions of his owners.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is an author, journalist and essayist who has been writing about black Los Angeles and wider issues since 1992. She teaches creative nonfiction at Antioch University Los Angeles and current events at the OASIS center in the Crenshaw district.

Los Angeles County health and elected officials again highlighted disparities in COVID-19 deaths among black residents today and also warned that a recent uptick in transmission rates could result in a lack of sufficient ICU beds in coming weeks.

From the shoreline to downtown and beyond, thousands of Southland residents came out in force again today in protest of police brutality and in condemnation of the death of George Floyd while being arrested by a white police officer in Minneapolis.